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When Frederick Wiseman started making documentaries, he used to wonder if there was a limit to what people would allow him to shoot.

The answer, which he got in 1968 while making Law & Order with the Kansas City police department, turned out to be no. During a late-night ride-along, the patrol car Wiseman was in was summoned by an undercover officer who had taken a prostitute to a hotel room and attempted to arrest her: the woman had slipped his grasp and fled to the basement.

"We find her hiding under some old furniture," the 88-year-old director tells me, taking up the half-century-old tale in the present tense. "And one of the cops drags her out and starts to strangle her.